Fresh peaches make daiquiris divine

Jul. 5, 2013

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It is the languid month, July; the only real work that should done this month is to spend a little extra time preparing cocktails to be sipped as we watch the sun dip below the treeline. It is a month when Southerners can savor our most precious gift to America: road-stand peaches.

There are many things that symbolize summer in the South, but few are as vivid to me as stopping at a roadside stand on the way to the beach and picking up vegetables, tomatoes and peaches. I loved the way my father relished these stops, chatting with the farmers and their kids like he was their neighbor.

He’d put the baskets in the back of the VistaCruiser and we’d eat like kings every evening. But the real treat were the sliced peaches, sprinkled with a little sugar and served at every meal. And best of all were the times Dad would pull out the churn and make fresh peach ice cream.

As we got older, the adult version of peach ice cream became a summer staple: the peach daiquiri! And as good as Dad’s peach ice cream was, his peach daiquiris were better.

We’ve all contributed to the recipe and our tastes have changed a bit during the years, ebbing and flowing on sweetness, and how to improve the texture. We tried banana to make a creamier texture, but have settled on mangoes. More recently, we’ve done away with adding extra sugar and started using a variety of liqueurs to augment the natural sweetness of the peach.

Though you may think you can skimp on the quality of rum in a frozen daiquiri, not so. There are some excellent white rums to choose from in our local liquor stores (I am partial to an Argentinian rum, Isla, right now), and I love the flavor of a bit of dark rum (Gosling’s Black Seal) in my peach daiquiri.